In Rough Country (23 page)

Like other Atwood fictions,
The Handmaid's Tale
is not a simple narrative. As she tells her story Offred frequently remarks that it's a “reconstruction” and that, at crucial times, she is not telling the truth, or offering variants of the truth, in
her description of her furtive love affair with the Commander's chauffeur Nick, for instance:

In the startling appendix to the novel titled “Historical Notes on
The Handmaid's Tale
,” we learn that Offred has not been writing her story but recording it in a sequence of secret tapes, to be discovered long after her death in the ruins of what was once the city of Bangor, Maine. Abruptly the reader is catapulted into a more conventionally science-fiction future, provided with a “partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195” our narrator Offred has long since vanished, like the nightmare Republic of Gilead, preserved two hundred years later in historical archives under the supervision of pompous (male) academics like Professor Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Archives, Cambridge University, England. (Reassuring to know that, though the United States is no more, there yet remains not only England, but a university protective of “liberal arts.”) As the Handmaid's Tale is an urgent, personal, “female” document, so the academics' “male” commentary on it is glib, condescending, fatuous, and self-serving. Atwood has said in interviews that she wanted to end
The Handmaid's Tale
on an optimistic note
³
to indicate that the Republic of Gilead did not
last forever, and to provide the reader with “historical” information unavailable to Offred, yet how deflating is this heavily ironic coda, how much more appropriate to that most perishable of literary genres, the academic satire, than to a work of such raw, urgent power as the Handmaid's Tale within
The Handmaid's Tale
. The appendix makes of the novel an astute, provocative social commentary, where its absence would have made the novel an abiding work of art ending with Offred's hopeful voice (“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light”).

The strikingly titled
Oryx and Crake
, Atwood's other notable work of speculative fiction, is a yet more ambitious and darkly prophetic work than
The Handmaid's Tale
, set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic terrain that is reverting to wilderness after a plague deliberately induced by the deranged scientist-genius Crake has wiped out most of mankind. (The madman/idealist Crake, self-named for the red-necked crake, a rare Australian bird extinct by the era of
Oryx and Crake
, is a credible descendent of Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and a younger variant of the genocidal-minded idealist of “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” by James Tiptree, Jr.) Narrated from the perspective of Jimmy, or Snowman as he calls himself, but not in Jimmy's first-person voice,
Oryx and Crake
is a highly conceptual, skillfully executed performance by a writer clearly impassioned by her subject: our endangered environment, and our endangered species. By turns tragic, serio-comic, farcical and blackly satiric, the novel suggests such classic films as Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove
, Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner
,
and the Australian-set Mad Max films of George Miller; its literary predecessors include Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(“The Voyage to Laputa”), Mary Shelley's
The Last Man
, H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
and
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, and Huxley's
Brave New World
. Atwood's epigraph from Swift, a typically Swiftian double entendre, is instructive:

In the nightmare world recalled by Jimmy, before Crake's plague-apocalypse, as in a parody of Marxist expectation the repressive nation-states of such dystopias as
1984
and
The Handmaid's Tale
seem to have withered away, replaced by gigantic global corporations (“HelthWyzer,” “CorpSetCorps”) whose control over individuals is invisible and near absolute; and whose financing of science is chillingly utilitarian and unprincipled. In this all-too-credible variant of Huxley's narcotized utopia, “demi-autistic” young scientists like Jimmy's school friend Crake of the Watson-Crick Institute are developing drugs like BlyssPluss, a super-Viagra with, as Crake says enthusiastically, the power to “protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases” as well as simultaneously “provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a generalized sense of energy and well-being”—all this, and it prolongs youth. A fourth capability, Crake says, would not be advertised:

Yet more diabolically, pharmaceutical companies are researching new diseases for which new, expensive medical technologies and drugs will be required: “The best diseases,” said Crake, “would be those that cause lingering illnesses.”

Both Jimmy and Crake are the offspring of scientists in the hire of giant corporations; both Jimmy's (fugitive) mother and Crake's (murdered) father were rebels. Jimmy is a feckless arts major who must attend the under-funded, falling-down Martha Graham Academy surrounded by slummy “pleeb-lands” while the science-prodigy Crake attends the prestigious, lavishly funded Watson-Crick Institute fondly known as “Asperger's U.” Like one of Swift's enthusiastic Laputians, Crake takes Jimmy on a guided tour through the research center whose grotesque mascot is a “spoat-gider” (“one of the first successful splices…goat crossed with spider”) and where highly specialized young scientists are working in such fields as “NeoAgriculture” (their project is a rapidly growing, seemingly headless chicken to be marketed as “Chickie Nobs”) and “BioDefences” (“wolvogs”—wolf-dogs). Inevitably, some of these exotic new transgenic species have slipped out of Watson-Crick laboratories to reproduce their kind in nature—or what
remains of nature: “snats,” “cane toads,” “rakunks.” In his trek in the jungle-terrain (somewhere in what was once the United States, in approximately 2025), Jimmy encounters such cinematic creatures as a rabbit that glows in the dusk, “a greenish glow filched from the iridicytes of a deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment.” (Lest one think that the fiction-writer is inventing such transgenic wonders, see Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin's appallingly fascinating
The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age
where on page 94 an identical rabbit by the bio-artist Eduardo Kac, “GFP Bunny,” appears as “art.”)
⁴

Crake is the deranged idealist who would rid the world of human cruelty and destructiveness, though he doesn't himself believe in either God or Nature and would appear to be wholly amoral. In place of
Homo sapiens
Crake has created a new species of humanity: simple, placid, dull-normal creatures lacking any sense of ego, or humor, for whom sex is a routine physiological function and who are programmed by their creator to die suddenly at the age of thirty, in the prime of life. The Children of Crake, as Jimmy calls them, are physically beautiful, perfectly proportioned, of no more human interest than “animated statues.” For these child-like creatures, the world's civilizations have been wiped out. New birth myths must be created for them by Snowman, who ironically finds himself revered by the Children of Crake as their savior, after Crake's death.

The constraining mantle of post-apocalyptic genre is borne lightly by Atwood in
Oryx and Crake
, but such cautionary fantasies have become so popular in recent decades that revitalizing the form is a considerable challenge. Where there is
an apocalypse, there must be an apocalypse-catalyst, or causer: the monomaniac Mad Scientist. Where there is such a villain, there must be a foil: the sensitive witness, the survivor who, like Ishmael, lives to tell the tale. There may even be a third person, a love object, for whom the two contend, in this case the former prostitute Oryx, whom Crake hires to educate the new breed of humans. She becomes for the Children of Crake the truly female figure. How to humanly register, still more feel any emotional involvement with characters like Jimmy/Snowman and the elusive Oryx when, as the novel hopes to persuade us, the earth's entire population, billions of men, women, children, are dying? Such vast cataclysms leave us unmoved no matter how skillfully rendered by so trenchant and committed a writer as Atwood, though visual dramatizations, as in Steven Spielberg's recent remake of
The War of the Worlds
, can rouse the viewer to a visceral horror that might seem to substitute for an emotional engagement. With its plethora of freaky forms,
Oryx and Crake
suggests one of those unnerving Saul Steinberg drawings in which recognizable human figures are surrounded by bizarre cartoon characters, human and animal and geometrical, some of them here stick figures.

 

Like
The Handmaid's Tale
and
Surfacing, Oryx and Crake
is tantalizingly open-ended. Jimmy/Snowman discovers that he isn't the last specimen of
Homo sapiens
left on earth after all—but will he, can he, dare he approach the other survivors? In a moment that replicates that of Atwood's unnamed protagonist in
Surfacing
, who contemplates her lover at a distance,
undecided whether to answer his calls to her, Jimmy/Snowman contemplates his fellow human beings at a similar distance and withdraws: “Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.”

Where Atwood's recent novels
Alias Grace
and
The Blind Assassin
, like
Oryx and Crake
, have been ambitiously high-concept fiction buttressed by a considerable amount of research,
Moral Disorder
, Atwood's newest gathering of short stories, is domestic realism at its most compelling: eleven sharply focused, intensely personal stories that function like chapters in an elliptical memoirist novel. In the seemingly artless, anecdotal prose of such previous stories of Atwood's as “Rape Fantasies,” “Hair Jewellery,” and “Giving Birth” (
Dancing Girls
, 1982) and the beautifully rendered “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (
Bluebeard's Egg
, 1986), Atwood takes us through the life of her protagonist Nell from the age of eleven, when her sister is born, to late middle age when Nell's children are grown and gone and she and her husband Tig are living in an age of “bad news”: “We don't like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it's coming our way.” As Nell's life is inextricably entwined with the lives of others—family, friends, lovers, her husband and his family, even an assortment of wonderfully individualized farm animals—we come to know her small, narrowly focused world as if it were our own.
Moral Disorder
is likely to be read, perhaps misread, as Margaret Atwood's most explicitly autobiographical fiction though Nell is not a writer, nor even a creative artist, but, simply, a decent, morally responsible and astute individual upon whom nothing is lost. As Nell thinks at the end of the funny, heartrending title story:

Early in
Moral Disorder
, in the ironically titled “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” we return another time to the wilderness setting of
Surfacing
, except that the focus isn't now on an adult daughter who has lost both her parents but on an eleven-year-old girl anxiously caught up in the mystery and dread of her middle-aged mother's pregnancy: “I couldn't understand why [my mother] had chosen to do what she'd done—why she'd turned herself into this listless, bloated version of herself, thus changing the future—my future—into something shadow-filled and uncertain. I thought she'd done it on purpose. It didn't occur to me that she might have been ambushed.” Warned by her father that her mother could become “very ill” unless the daughter takes over the most strenuous household tasks, the girl thinks: “He always thought I knew more than I knew, and that I was bigger than I was, and older, and hardier. What he mistook for calmness and competence was actually fright.” Only after the baby's birth, when the family has returned to the city, and the girl is older, does she become empowered, impulsively, to rebel against her mother and the household duties that have shadowed her; at the cusp of adolescence, Atwood's
yet-unnamed narrator is alert to “seductive and tawdry and frightening pleasures” of her own.

Subsequent linked stories—“The Headless Horseman,” “My Last Duchess”—take the girl through a relatively conventional middle-class adolescence, distinguished by an uncommon interior life: